Kristen Ford performs her new song "Best Friends" on WNHH FM.
Onstage, a touring indie singer-songwriter was singing a Mother’s Day song paying tribute to a woman who made a difference in her life.
On a stool near the back of Cafe Nine, a woman retrieved a packet of tissues. She pulled one out. She needed to use it several times before the song was done.
The song was about her: The performer onstage, Kristen Ford, is her stepdaughter. It wasn’t the first time the stepmom, Diane Whittie, had shed tears over the song.
You didn’t have to be related to Ford to be touched by the song. You didn’t even have to be a mom or a stepmom (though if you have kids, it may have helped).
“Happy mother’s day / Even though it’s not your name …” Ford sang. “I will always be your kin …” She had the whole audience, not just her stepmom, with her at each step.
Ford’s unvarnished, passionate vocals added to the poignancy, as did the guitar arrangement, which made use of open high strings as a foil for a descending chord progression. Her skills as an arranger were on even more obvious display as her high-energy set continued; using a guitar, a microphone, and a loop pedal, she was able to create the sound of a full band, and like the best loop-pedal users, she made the creation of that sound part of the show, as the audience got to watch each song constructed in front of them.
Ford was in New Haven on a stop in a national “Pride” Tour that doubles as an introduction to the tracks on War in the Living Room, her new (and fifth) album.
Before heading to Boston for her next tour stop, Ford played “Mother’s Day” and stripped-down versions of two songs from the new album amid a discussion about her music and career during a visit to WNHHFM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click on the above video to watch her perform the album’s first single, “Grey Sky Blue.”
Ford, a familiar face over the years on stages in New Haven — where her father and stepmother live — has seen her career start to take off. In addition to the new album and tour, she has an acting role and two songs on the soundtrack album to the 2021 film Valentine Crush. (She plays a roller derby-er named Knockout Nancy.) She has embarked on side projects including Evrgrn, a project with cellist Kels Cordare, and the hip-hop duo Blu Janes, with rapper MC Genesis Blu.
Based in Nashville, Ford is described as an “indie rock singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist.” I might describe her sound as “Ani DiFranco meets Tracy Chapman meets the Ramones.” (At Cafe Nine she updated “Give Me A Reason” to reflect on American’s downward slide toward fascism.)
Whatever labels one tries to attach to her, Ford is a talent to watch as she continues spreading her wings. She returns to Connecticut for a June 16 stop at Bridgeport’s Park City Music before the tour heads west.
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Colin Roberts |
May 26, 2022 9:24 am
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On Wednesday night, Cafe Nine hosted a gem of a show to a small but captivated audience. Blues and rock were the musical selling points, but the artists who shared the stage all brought an extra dimension — that of showmanship and sincerity — that can only happen in small venues like the New Haven club.
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Brian Slattery |
May 17, 2022 8:36 am
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Julia Rooney
Scrollscape.
Julia Rooney’s Scrollscape hangs in the front window of Artspace, serving the dual purpose from the street of inviting people to come in while also obscuring what’s going on within. Inside, Scrollscape reveals itself as a piece that one is allowed to wander within. When you’re inside it, you can only see out in bits and pieces; likewise, someone looking at you from outside the piece — or, for that matter, from another part of the piece — would only be able to see you a little bit at a time. It’s a little disorienting, obfuscating, playful on one but tinged with a little menace. If someone comes looking for you in there, or if you go looking for them, is it hide and seek or stalking?
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Brian Slattery |
May 16, 2022 8:31 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
The Town Green District’s New Haven Night Market once again drew throngs of people, as the event closed the intersection of Orange and Crown and its surrounding streets to car traffic, turning those city blocks into a bustling bazaar of food, art, and crafts. But there was also evidence that the event was expanding more informally, as artists and businesses beyond those blocks threw events to attract their own parts of the crowd.
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Thomas Breen |
Apr 29, 2022 9:55 am
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Beacon Communities image
Proposed housing slated to replace parking at 300 State lot. (Building on left would be new. Building on right currently exists.)
A Boston-based affordable housing developer’s plans to build 76 new apartments in the Ninth Square got a fiscal boost, thanks to a state award of $1.8 million in federal tax credits.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 29, 2022 9:52 am
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As a sketched plane lands on a runway, the driving drums give way to a big hook from a guitar, the kind you get to write after you’ve already written a million songs. Stephen Peter Rodgers — a.k.a. Steve Rodgers, formerly of Mighty Purple and the Space — follows it up with an equally sharp vocal. ” Driving all alone / silence wreaking havoc in my head / I turn the radio on / they’re talking about the end of the world again / this crazy human life / this worlds as fragile as it’s ever been.” Then, at the end of the chorus, he delivers the message: “let’s stop just getting through / it’s time live a real life / wake up, wake up / let’s live a real life again.”
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 26, 2022 8:33 am
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Colombian neo-cumbia. Egyptian avant garde. Arabic surf guitar. And a baby boy. All this and more has been on the mind of musician and music promoter Rick Omonte as he rolls out a new series of shows for 2022 through his nom de booking, Shaki Presents.
As a new traffic-calming intersection has reopened at Orange Street and MLK Boulevard, old driving habits have persisted, at least for now: blowing through red lights.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 12, 2022 9:05 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Anne:Gogh
The concept of time has had its way with all of us in the past two years, leading many to redefine its more linear aspects and reimagine a new framework. On Saturday night five poets made their way through Artspace New Haven to pose and present their own interpretations of time, influenced and inspired by the “Dyschronics” exhibit currently displayed there, as well as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The event was part of One City, One Read, an ongoing International Festival of Arts and Ideas program series that continues now through June throughout New Haven, focusing on Butler’s all-too-prescient novel.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 11, 2022 9:50 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
Ceschi Ramos
Four artists rapped their way into the weekend at The State House this past Friday night, and whether on that stage for the first time or for the first time in a good long while, they brought the crowd forth and kept them there, hanging on every word and rhyme like a lifeline.
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Colin Roberts |
Apr 11, 2022 9:40 am
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Colin Roberts Photos
Buried Alive.
On Sunday afternoon, the State House brought back the iconic Sunday matinee show, a staple of the hardcore scene since the ’80s. Anchored by Buffalo, N.Y.’s Buried Alive — a highly influential late-’90s band — the show boasted a stacked lineup of unique bands, mostly newer and younger than the headliners.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 30, 2022 9:06 am
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Jonathan Milberger, Michael Larocca, Kaelen Ghandi.
“Eighteen years of doing it and we’re still doing it,” Bob Gorry, founder of the New Haven Improvisers Collective, said from the stage of Cafe Nine. “The pandemic stopped us for a bit, but we’re back.”
He was referring not only to the NHIC workshops that have begun again at Never Ending Books, but to the fact that, on Tuesday night, he was again hosting musicians, and performing himself, for a night of improvised music at the music-scene anchor on State and Crown.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 28, 2022 9:24 am
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Photo courtesy of Fernando Pinto
Nirvana performing at The Moon on Whalley 1991, a show promoted by Pinto.
Karen Ostrom Photo
Fernando Pinto: From the Moon and Tune Inn to Cafe 9.
Music promoter Fernando Pinto entered Blue State Coffee on a sunny morning with a bag of flyers under his arm as he finished up his walk around the city to hang them up at his usual spots.
“I know all of them,” he said — though he is still finding more spots, even after 40 years of booking and promoting shows throughout New Haven. As he celebrates that anniversary, two shows in particular are on Pinto’s mind, and on those flyers he is posting.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 18, 2022 9:15 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Kaleta and Super Yamba Band brought the legendary West African sound of Afrobeat to Cafe Nine on Thursday night, proving that the message of the revolutionary music lives on, and connects to the present moment, as much as ever.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 16, 2022 9:06 am
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Brian Slattery Photo
Minus Points.
Minus Points had just finished another blistering song, an assault of distorted strings, drums, and emotions, when there was a request from the audience: “Can you do something laid back and chill right now?”
It was a joke; no one at Cafe Nine on Tuesday night was there to play or hear laid-back or chill. Instead, three new New Haven-based bands had come to turn it up loud, and they did.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 15, 2022 8:53 am
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Margaret Milano Photo
The Ratz
“I’m slowly easing my way into a full-blown political record,” said vocalist/guitarist Jeffrey Thunders of The Ratz, who will be celebrating the release of the band’s latest, Found Dead, this Sunday afternoon at Cafe Nine with Cry Havoc, Midnight Creeps, and Murdervan.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 11, 2022 9:19 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
The Alpaca Gnomes
Three bands took the stage at The State House on Thursday night for a raucous night of music and community, brought together by the newest booking duo in town, Elm Underground.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 24, 2022 9:27 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Alyssa.
As the news Wednesday night filled with reports of war, two vital musicians — Shanell Alyssa and Riki Stevens — brought a deep sense of peace to the Cafe Nine stage at State and Crown.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 17, 2022 8:42 am
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On a street in London, a woman walks draped in an impossibly long, radiantly blue textile. The fabric gives her the air of a queen, but a queen out of place and out of time. She seems to move at a completely different pace from her bustling urban surroundings. Nobody notices her, as if she’s a ghost. It’s a visitation of the colonized to the colonizer. She has an almost untouchable strength, but seems also powerless; she can protect herself, but not anyone around her.
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Maya McFadden |
Feb 11, 2022 12:28 pm
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Spinnaker
Square 10 plan rendering.
With the long-delayed redevelopment of the former Coliseum tentatively set to begin this coming spring, the developer clued local contractors about how to seek a piece of the work.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 11, 2022 10:12 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
He Was A God
“Are you sick and tired?” screamed Ben Curns of the band He Was A God, with his arms raised to the audience. They answered in a chorus that turned up the volume of an already thunderous and thoroughly entertaining atmosphere at Cafe Nine last night where three bands, each one distinctly different from the other but similar in approach, delivered a Thursday full of hot and heavy sounds.
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Thomas Breen |
Feb 4, 2022 2:56 pm
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Thomas Breen photos
Rob Greenberg with pressed tin behind ACME wood paneled walls.
EMERGE crew prepares 29-33 Crown for "mass timber" future.
Rob Greenberg photo
Historical detritus-turned-artifacts that Greenberg has found at his family's former commercial home, including torn pieces of a Yiddish-language newspaper.
Hiding behind the walls and beneath the floorboards and amidst the rubble of a mid-demolition former vintage furniture store is pile after pile of Ninth Square history.
Fortunately, New Haven’s “Indiana Jones” is on the scene — combing through the wreckage and preserving whichever artifacts from the city’s commercial and industrial past he can find.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 2, 2022 9:10 am
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Cafe Nine on State and Crown was the spot Tuesday night for three young New Haven-based acts who brought genuine affection to the stage — for one another, for the audience, and for the Elm City itself.
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Kimberly Wipfler |
Jan 31, 2022 5:00 pm
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Kimberly Wipfler Photo
CeCe Brown Sugah performs Sunday night at Jazzy's.
A new Harlem Renaissance-inspired burlesque performance turned up the heat at Jazzy’s Cabaret supper club Sunday night, as the debut of The Sugar Strut: World Famous Burlesque Revue left audience members thirsty for more.
